Flint is a far different place than the city where four generations of my family lived. But there is still hope for the place once labeled the “Happiest Town in Michigan.”

The national media, along with various activists and
celebrities, are suddenly obsessed with my beleaguered hometown of Flint,
Michigan, after it emerged that state officials ignored clear signs of lead
poisoning in the city’s water supply. Rachel Maddow is outraged. Erin Brokovich
is on the case. Jesse Jackson is there to offer spiritual guidance. Cher—yes,
Cher—called Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder a “murderer” on Twitter for
his alleged crimes against the former factory town that Michael Moore put on
the map with Roger & Me.

I don’t blame them and the rest of the country for being
angry. I’m angry, too. Who wouldn’t be? But I have to ask: What took you so
long? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I feel like people should have been
reaching out to help about 30 years ago.

While the water crisis may be the most-high profile
catastrophe in the city where General Motors was born, prospered and then skipped
town, it’s certainly not the first that should make your blood boil. Consider that
Flint has had one of the highest violent crime rates in the country for decades.
Then there are the thousands of abandoned houses—many of them once home to
middle-class autoworkers—that sit empty, acting as ramshackle crime incubators.
As a result, arson is commonplace.

Oh, by the way, if you include the folks who have given up
even looking for a job, the real unemployment rate is in the double digits. And
Flint has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation—41.4 percent overall
and 66.5 percent for children—so thousands of residents drinking poisoned water
were already marginalized.

Unfortunately, I could go on, but I think you get the
picture.

And what happens in Michigan when a city teetering on
collapse encounters the inevitable budget shortfalls? The governor sends in an
emergency manager to relieve democratically elected officials of their duties
and supposedly put things in order. But in a place like Flint, there are
limited ways to balance the books. Ultimately, draconian layoffs and budget
cuts are seen as the only solution. So many cops got pink slips—the police
force has been cut in half in the last decade—that there are times when not a
single officer is patrolling the streets. Numerous fire stations have been
shuttered over the years. And, of course, decisions like switching to Flint
River water are made to save money, with disastrous results.

Perhaps irrationally, I’m still hoping that some sliver of
good can come out of the water crisis. But simply dealing with the latest
calamity without having a national conversation about why these bad things
happen to places like Flint—and coming up with systematic, long-term solutions
to stabilize the city—ensures that in five years we will be right back where we
started.

Flint’s problems
may seem outsized, but they are not isolated and hold dire lessons for the rest
of America. A growing number of places throughout the country look a lot
like my hometown, defined by persistent poverty, a crumbling infrastructure, and
a populace that feels betrayed and abandoned. If you think your community is
immune from these problems, I’d ask you to reconsider. A familiar line I’ve
heard more than once around town is a warning we should all heed, regardless of
where we live: “Flint, coming to a city near you.”

Donateto the Community Foundation of Greater Flint to help
solve the Flint Water Crisis.

Friday, May 20, 2016

For a hint of what conversations are like in San Francisco these days — amidst the housing crisis, homelessness problem, and gentrification wars — I present a recent verbatim email exchange among four longtime residents. Names have been changed to Oscar, Felix, Murray, and Roy.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at10:11 AM Oscar wrote:My position on housing in SF as fantastically articulated
by Sonja Trauss, a "deeply eccentric city-government nerd" and
housing activist in SF. Interestingly, I read about her in The Stranger, a
Seattle paper. It may have something to do with the fact that here in SF, at
least in the Mission, pictures of her with dollar signs for eyes have been
taped to telephone polls. Here's her evil plot:

"We need more housing units, and the market-rate units we build now will
become tomorrow’s middle-income apartments. Her theory is based on
her experience working for a neighborhood advisory committee in a rapidly
gentrifying part of Philadelphia right before the mid-2000s housing bubble
burst. “When the market crashed,” Trauss told me, “all those projects we had
approved went on sale for a third of the price they would have, while all the
projects we gummed up were never built. We lost the opportunity to create more
units.”

Lest you think she is in the pocket of the developers, like a lot of Missionites
apparently do, she is also a member of an organization that is trying to sue
Bay Area suburbs for their restrictive building policies, i.e. they're trying
to force suburbs to build more housing, too.

I like her position because it's considers the long view. We don't want to be
the people in the 60's and 70's who fought BART expansion because it seemed
like too much change. And it would have definitely changed neighborhoods then,
maybe even for the worse (16th and 18th BART weren't nice 'hoods for
a long time) but obviously we could really use those proposed BART stops now,
40 years later.

It's the same with housing. Market rate stuff today might become middle class
housing later, but you have to build it while there's demand or it might not
ever get done. Look how hard it is to find developers now to build affordable
housing; wouldn't it be great if 40 years ago more stuff had been built? We
will likely be thinking the same thing 40 years from now.

And if you don't build market rate stuff now, it puts enormous pressure on the
existing housing stock. There have been 5 homes that have sold on my block in
the past year, 4 of which were 2 million dollars, and 1 of which was 1 million
that's going to be flipped for at least twice that. These were middle class and
lower class homes just 10-20 years ago. There is no way I could afford my
neighborhood now, and I bought just 5 years ago. Only rich people can move in
now.

So when I hear "oh great, a new building is going up for rich people,"
it seems to me that rich people are moving here whether we build stuff or not,
so do you want them buying up all the existing houses/condos in formerly poor
and middle class neighborhoods, putting enormous pressure on landlords to sell,
or do you want them in new buildings? Because they're coming here either way.
It doesn't mean we have to do it carte blanche, we can still have robust
planning and zoning and affordable housing requirements for new apartment
buildings. But we have to build.

Sorry for the longness. I think I really need a job.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at10:53 AM Felix wrote:

Yes, we need
rigorous zoning so that we build in order to satisfy demand while not
destroying the character of the city. Of course it's going to change, but we
need to guide that change in order to maintain the things we cherish in the
city and the things that people move here for.

But we also need to
find a way to build affordable housing. Market rate housing just doesn't work
in places like San Francisco that are geographically limited. It's simply
impossible and keeps getting demonstrated in any other development area where
geography is a key factor like Manhattan, London, or Hong Kong.

And that leads to
the larger issues here. The entire Bay Area needs to develop together which
requires more pockets of urban density, a very robust transit system area wide,
and a more united local government because the administration of growth has
been lacking. I'll leave the larger area governance question for later but here
in San Francisco we have a local government that struggles to play an effective
role in all of these questions. Part of that is simple leadership in that Ed
Lee clearly is not the person to lead a discussion nor find the programs nor
hire the people to make the changes. Part is structural in that the city has to
live within a legislative structure erected over 150 years. Part is due the
depressingly normal state of political anomie by our citizens.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at11:21 AM Oscar wrote:

But what if we
can't figure out a way to build affordable housing? Because my guess is we
won't (we never have). What if we don't get a dynamic leader to help the entire
Bay Area develop in concert? Don't hold your breath (since I've been here we've
had Brown, Newsom, and Lee). The argument seems to be if we can't build
perfectly, we shouldn't build at all. And that leaves us in our current
situation, with way more demand than supply, and the things we cherish get changed
anyway because the rich keep moving here. It's the classic situation of the
perfect being the enemy of the good.

I'm curious about your contention that market rate housing just doesn't work in
SF. What proof is there of that? There is evidence that rents started really
going up in 50's, which is when a most of SF land was built on. Since then,
there just hasn't been an ability to easily build out, we can just build up.
And most of SF has been against building up since then, and continues to be.
I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't work if it hasn't really been
tried.

And as for keeping the character of SF intact, that doesn't seem possible. I've
been here since '97 and it's now a totally different city, and in '97 it was a
totally different city than it was in '77. I'm not even sure what SF's character
is right now, or if anybody comes here because of it. I think people come here
because of the economy, and they want to live in SF because it's a fun city
with a lot of bars and restaurants. No one's coming here because it's a cool art
scene, or because it's so bohemian. That era is long gone, probably before any
of us even moved here.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at2:06 PM Murray wrote:

Frighteningly, I'm
not sure we are not all right at the same time. Which seems like a bad sign.

Nah, I want to
avoid the perfect/good dichotomy. If we do nothing we get what we have now,
rampant traffic and development that doesn't fit together. It'll hit a wall
soon, there will be another election battle over growth, but good policy
probably won't win out.

The thing is that
we know how to build affordable housing but it takes lots of planning, lots of
collaboration with developers, and more of a region wide solution. We're doing
it all over SOMA, in the Castro, Bay View, and in Oakland. Most notably we are
not doing it in Marin, and the vast majority of the peninsula where there is
tons of land. And we're not developing the transportation network that we need
to get people from affordable areas on the periphery of Alameda to the jobs
everywhere else. One of the big problems here is that we haven't been doing it
for decades so there's pent up demand.

Everything I've
read about development policy in NY says that the city explicitly embraced
market rate housing growth as the solution to cost from the 90's through the
Bloomberg administration. They built hundreds of thousands of units and the
cost of housing only increased while affordable housing decreased. I remember
reading that Bloomberg's own housing czar admitted that market rate housing
solutions didn't work but can't dig up that piece. I've read the same for
cities with constrained space, high foreign capital flows, which are also perceived
as very desirable. Here's one piece that is a summation of Bloomberg's housing
policies but keep in mind that he was just continuing the Giuliani
administration's policies so that's 20 years of aggressive development that
continues to this day.

Sure, the city has
changed dramatically since I moved here and I don't know if I can define the
character of it either but you sound like the worst crotchety old man by saying
it's not cool any more. It's definitely a different sort of cool, there is all
sorts of crazy innovative stuff happening here that may not be traditional art
but it's pretty amazing. I'll skip technology altogether. Look at the culinary
world alone where SF is in the white hot center of the
coffee/brewing/chocolate/sustainable food/and many other movements. The high
culture scene is insane with the new SFMOMA being just the latest addition.
Sports culture is everywhere from our professional teams to all the amateur
soccer action, climbing gyms, the surfing at Ocean Beach, bicyclists, you name
it. Take two small examples of literary culture, LitQuake and 826 as examples
of that scene. And that's just what I know about. God knows what the literal
kids are doing today.

But back to
solutions. Everyone agrees that we need housing, and that we need affordable
housing so let's figure out how to build it so that everyone wins. The same
goes for business regulations, transportation, schools, homelessness, and the
other big issues facing the city and region. We need to carve a way out of this
stasis because that's where we've been for far too long. Everyone is frustrated
to point of giving up which is incredibly dangerous. I see that frequently in
my own little corner of volunteer activism at Mila's school. It's really easy
to burn out and give up because the process it so difficult to deal with. But
everything is going to keep turning so if you can stay engaged then your voice
is going to be heard more than anyone else's. With that somewhat minor
observation I have to stop because I actually have work to do today, or perhaps
I should start viewing this as my true work.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at4:32 PM Oscar wrote:

I think we just
like different things. Most of the cool stuff you mention about SF is due to it
being a city full of well-off and rich people (the rest is due to it being in a
naturally beautiful region). All that coffee/food/sustainability stuff really
took off in the 90's and 00's after the tech booms, though I grant you that the
seeds of some of it was already here. But it takes money to support $4 cups of coffee,
$8 beer pints, and $25/pound sustainably caught salmon at Avedanos. So it seems
like if the city becomes even wealthier, you'll just get more of what you like.
It's not like New York or London lack that stuff, even if they're not on the
forefront of it, they're adopting it. It seems to me the culture you want to
keep is just upper-middle class culture. Which is nice, don't get me wrong, but
I wouldn't describe it as especially cool, to my taste anyway. And I certainly
don't see it going away, it just seems to get stronger. And it's funny
speculating what the kids are doing here, because there are fewer literal kids
in SF than any comparable city in the US.

But my point was really that people aren't moving here for the culture. They're
moving here to get jobs, because this is where a huge new economy is growing.
That's going to make it more expensive, no matter how many places we build. But
if we don't build anything, then it's going to be more expensive than if we
build nothing. And we have to give people who move here for jobs someplace to
live. Nowhere in the article on NYC did it say how many units Bloomberg built,
and it doesn't give any info on how expensive it might be if they hadn't been
built, nor does it talk about how many people would be living outside NYC and
commuting there. I'm sure there are some economists who have an opinion on all
that. Building housing might not make things cheaper immediately, but it sure
doesn't make things more expensive.

But I do agree that we need better planning and zoning of all sorts. We just
can't, for instance, not build anything in the Mission for 2 years while we get
things just right, because if our history with BART or MUNI is any indication,
we'll never get it exactly right. And we need to get more housing in the Peninsula,
but again, we can't say we won't build stuff here until that happens. All the
stuff you want is great but should have been done decades ago, and now we don't
have the luxury of waiting for it.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at4:45 PM Felix wrote:

Sorry, I'll respond
to everything else later but the figures I've seen for the Bloomberg
administration alone are 160,000 units to house more than 300,000 people.
There's lots written about it, take a look.

And it's not like
we're not building here. We've been building at a torrid pace of at least 3,500
units/year going back at least a few years and permits for building are almost
quadruple that last year.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at4:50 PM Oscar wrote:

We might be
building at a torrid pace for SF, but we could build a lot more than 3,500 a
year if we wanted. And I'm talking about density, tall shit, in neighborhoods
with existing transit.

Anyway, we should clearly talk about this more offline but I'm just curious--are
you saying that NYC shouldn't have built those 160,000 housing units because
they caused housing in NYC to become more expensive?

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at5:02 PM Roy wrote:

I haven't had time
to ready your back and forth, but I hope you all read this:

This is all new.
I'd be curious to see this done with data from other cities to see if it holds.
If so, there appear to be implications for understanding what impacts housing
affordability and, more specifically, how you can forecast and plan to address
it.

And here's a
follow-up that says SF is screwed but other cities have a chance not to be
screwed.

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 8:56 AM Felix wrote:In the urban future all cities are going to face this challenge so maintaining a unique sense of place, diversity, and affordability are all the major concerns for urbanists these days.

WRT NY's development, I'm just saying that they built aggressively and housing only got more expensive so simply building doesn't do anything for affordability, it just creates more housing for the affluent, lots of it as parking lots for international cash. You really have to manage it otherwise you run into the same problem. All things considered SF may not be doing that badly simply because it has so many requirement for affordable housing but there is a lot of room for improvement.

As for what we're doing, yes, density is great. We're doing tons of that. Look at Rincon where massive condo developments have been built for the past ten years. There's plenty more to come because that's the long term plan for the city, ie develop density along transport corridors. There are even bright spots elsewhere, there's this huge project to build densely all along El Camino Real which is a real change.

"Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City" by Gordon Young

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Flint Expatriates

A blog for the long-lost residents of the Vehicle City by Gordon Young

"I grew up on the Eastside and recall the unexplained pride I felt when the 3:30 Buick factory whistle blew and the roughly dressed workers poured out of the General Motors labyrinth swinging their lunch pails. Some were headed for home and some for the corner bar, but all with the determined step of an army after a battle won. I somehow felt as if I were a part of this giant assembly line and the city it fed."